Testing...

Our show started out with the dressage test, a straight forward test with walk, trot, and canter in both directions.Warm up was outside, and he started out well, with no overly dramatic flinching away from other horses in the arena. We rode in to the indoor for our test when called.

Cappy sort of... stalled out. Our walk around the perimeter of the low fenced area marked out for the arena was in s-l-o-w motion. He sort of looked at the judge's stand, but was really so agog at the high walls of the indoor, the squares of light lying across the footing from windows high above, the strangeness of it all, that he just sort of crawled. He didn't feel nervous, he felt like lead. It was quite odd, as if he just wanted to cease existing and avoid this new danger that way.

I asked for a trot, and it was if I had the unbalanced, green-as-the-day-I-bought-him horse beneath me.

We staggered in and down center line. We halted in the correct place. We performed relatively circle shaped figures in the prescribed location at trot.

Canter, not so much. He lurched like a drunken camel, unbalanced and dead straight through his body.

We were supposed to be circling.

He was flat and fast, yet about to break at any moment.

We lurched back to trot.

We had an excellent free walk across the diagonal.

The second half was as abysmal as the first. Our chew-ie circle, where the rider lengthens the rein and the horse should follow it down seeking the contact, was a joke, except nothing was funny.

We completed our test, and I patted Cappy on the neck as we exited at A. He had done his best, after all.

I returned him to his stall, gave him a few handfuls of grain, and went out to walk the stadium course.